Saturday, March 22, 2008

1) Hey Bob, where the hell was that half court offense in your 16 years at UC?2) Bob, I think you coach better when you don't look like a giant stick of butter.3) Nice to see you can actually win a 2nd round game for a change.4) Were those the pastiest teams you've even seen. Guys go outside.5) The officials called every single one of those bump checks on Duke. When they really had to play defense, WVU killed them.

Hopefully I won't have to watch one of those god awful Coach K/Amex commericals for the rest of the tournament.

So you are a terrorist and as part of your terrorist activities you do things like rob banks, bomb police cars, kill an innocent person and escape prosecution for 20 plus years; I think six years in jail just might be a little light.

Apparently not for Sara Jane Olsen.

Excerpt

The release of former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson from prison has angered Jon Opsahl, whose mother was gunned down in a Carmichael bank by the SLA.

Myrna Opsahl was shot to death in the lobby of a Carmichael bank during an April 21, 1975, SLA bank robbery.

After serving six years in prison for his mother's death and for trying to bomb police cars, Olson is now free. She was released Monday from the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla.

Since the Wright controversy broke, I've been saying there is an underlying narrative that Obama is a socialist at best, a marxist at worst.

How can I come to that conclusion when he's never actually stated any overall government vision except hope and change?

Let's look at the dots

1) The Che Guevara flags in the Houston campaign office. Obamamania supporters will contend that these were volunteers but what volunteer would think that was appropriate under any circumstance unless they felt the man they supported would think it's OK

2) The photos of Obama without his hand over heart during a National Anthem. When the photos first broke, I never really gave it much attention but now I'm wondering.

3) His lame reasoning for not wearing a US flag pin on his lapel; calling it a faux patriotism. Somehow, he had no problem displaying that same faux patriotism with the 400 hundred flags behind him when he did his "race speech" this week. Again, not a big deal until some of these other events have taken place.

4) MiCHElle Obama's statement that for only the first time she was actually "proud of America". What kind of person would actually say that? Especially one who was able to achieve her level of success.

6) The Wright controversy. The more that continues to poor out on this church, the more of an Anti American, Marxist vision you see. Here's a great article spelling out the teachings of this church (HT Bizzyblog).

Excerpt

Wright, who hasn't been giving interviews since the controversy broke, told conservative TV talk-show host Sean Hannity last year that Trinity's black value system also had parallels to the liberation theology of laypeople in Nicaragua three decades ago. There, liberation theology became associated with Marxist revolution and the Sandinistas, and split the Roman Catholic Church.

Again, would he be a member of this church if he didn't find this drivel to be consistent with own beliefs, the beliefs his children will learn as a result of their presence in this church.

In 2004, John Kerry ran for president as a war hero in Vietnam. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth emasculated Kerry on his heroism. Many democrats still believe that Kerry's response was too slow and too weak to the charges. But how could he really refute the charges when there was all this video of him calling out US troops as war criminals? Kerry had all these dots of behavior (anyone ever watch Dick Cavett in the democratic party?) laying all over the place and the democrats never actually connected them. SBVT did it for them.

The same is going to be true of Obama. The media and liberal blogs never vetted this guy. They were so preoccupied with cleaning up the pee in their pants from the presence of someone so charismatic and articulate, it never occurred to any of them they might want to take a better look at this guy. Now he's going to be "swift boated" because they never did their job.

This democratic primary season provides the perfect metaphor for how democrats actually govern. They use feelings in their decision making process instead of actual thought. They get all excited about a new government program. So excited, they never actually connect the dots so they can foresee the unintended consequences of their actions. Then BAM! they sit back and say, "wow, we never saw that coming".

Known as the "Shameless" family among horrified neighbours, the McFaddens "boast" three generations of adults who are not working.

All ten members of the clan share a council house and live off benefits amounting to around £32,000 a year. And very happy they are, too.

Matriarch is grandmother Sue McFadden, 54. "Our neighbours are so snobby - they call us the "Shameless" family and say that we ought to go out to work. But how can we work when we have all these children to look after?

When I first read this I thought these people lived in "Progress City" right here in the US.

Friday, March 21, 2008

The best thing about the NCAA tournament now is being able to watch your game on your computer via cbs sportsline.

The best part of that, you don't have to watch the game your local station is tuned to.

Another reason? You can hit the "boss" button and the screen flips you out of the game and throws this this graph on your monitor; Click on the graph and read the info. It's hilarious.

It feels good to put one over on your boss doesn't it? But as I asked my assistant, what happens when you are the boss? Where's my boss button? How about when I hit the boss button I get a refund of some payroll taxes, or a democrat thanks me for hiring a productive employee, or Obamamania doesn't refer to me as a typical white person.

I thought this was a typical satire piece from the Onion until I read it and now I'm not so sure it didn't come from a typical newspaper like the NY Times.

Excerpt

According to witnesses, a loud black man approached a crowd of some 4,000 strangers in downtown Chicago Tuesday and made repeated demands for change.

"The time for change is now," said the black guy, yelling at everyone within earshot for 20 straight minutes, practically begging America for change. "The need for change is stronger and more urgent than ever before. And only you—the people standing here today, and indeed all the people of this great nation—only you can deliver this change."

It is estimated that, to date, the black man has asked every single person in the United States for change.

"I've already seen this guy four times today," Chicago-area ad salesman Blake Gordon said. "Every time, it's the same exact spiel. 'I need change.' 'I want change.' Why's he so eager for all this change? What's he going to do with it, anyway?"

When it's all said and done , I think this typical black guy is no more than another typical politician.

This is the kind of liberal blather that has resulted in the racial issues in the first place. It goes back to my theory of meetings; nothing has ever been accomplished by "talking". Just ask how the issues in Darfur have improved since the UN started having meetings on the subject.

Nothing has ever been improved simply by talking about it. Has a bully ever been stopped because Jr. tried "talking" to him? Just ask Ralphie.

In my mind, the more we talk about this crap the more ingrained it becomes. I'll quote a liberal on the subject. None other than Christopher Hitchens

People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of "race" or "gender" alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

"I understand MSNBC has suspended Mr. Imus," Obama told ABC News, "but I would also say that there's nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group. And I would hope that NBC ends up having that same attitude."

Reporters covering the United Nations complain that the organization, whose Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls for freedom of the press, has been trying to stifle reporters covering the U.N. itself.

This month, for example, U.N. officials reportedly seized videotapes from journalists who recorded the site of a U.N. helicopter crash in Nepal.

In addition, the group Reporters Without Borders says the U.N. yielded to pressure from certain member countries in refusing to recognize "Freedom of Expression Day."

Earlier this year, the U.N. threatened to pull the credentials of Inner City Press reporter Matthew Russell Lee after he reported embarrassing stories about the U.N. Development Program (UNDP). Inner City Press also was delisted from Google News for a time, fueling speculation that the U.N. had played a role in that incident.

Critics of the U.N.'s treatment of the press say these are just a few recent examples of U.N. hostility toward, and intimidation of, journalists who ask questions that U.N. officials don't want to answer.

If Barack Obama was not in church that particular day, he belonged to that church for 20 years. He made a donation of more than $20,000 to that church.

In all that time, he never had a clue as to what kind of man Jeremiah Wright was? Give me a break!

You can’t be with someone for 20 years, call him your mentor, and not know about his racist and anti-American views.

Neither Barack Obama nor his media spinmeisters can put this story behind him with some facile election-year rhetoric. If Senator Obama wants to run with the rabbits and hunt with the hounds, then at least let the rabbits and the hounds know that.

The fact that Obama talks differently than Jeremiah Wright does not mean that his track record is different. Barack Obama’s voting record in the Senate is perfectly consistent with the far-left ideology and the grievance culture, just as his wife’s statement that she was never proud of her country before is consistent with that ideology.

Shelby Steele with an excellent article about Obamamania and the subliminal "deal" he has with white America.

Excerpt

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

More Mark Steyn filleting the Obamamania claim that they didn't know their pastor was a racist.

Excerpt

Ah, well, no, the senator told ABC News. The Rev. Wright is like "an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with." So did he agree with goofy old Uncle Jeremiah on Sept. 16, 2001? That Sunday morning, Uncle told his congregation that the United States brought the death and destruction of 9/11 on itself. "We nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," said the Rev. Wright. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards."

Is that one of those "things I don't always agree with"? Well, Sen. Obama isn't saying, responding merely that he wasn't in church that morning. OK, fair enough, but what would he have done had he happened to have shown up on Sept. 16? Cried "Shame on you!" and stormed out? Or, if that's a little dramatic, whispered to Michelle that he didn't want their daughters hearing this kind of drivel while rescue workers were still sifting through the rubble and risen from his pew in a dignified manner and led his family to the exit? Or would he have just sat there with an inscrutable look on his face as those around him nodded?

All Sen. Obama will say is that "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." And in that he may be correct. There are many preachers who would be happy to tell their congregations "God damn America." But Barack Obama is not supposed to be the candidate of the America-damners: He's not the Rev. Al Sharpton or the Rev. Jesse Jackson or the rest of the racial grievance-mongers. Obama is meant to be the man who transcends the divisions of race, the candidate who doesn't damn America but "heals" it – if you believe, as many Democrats do, that America needs healing.

Yet since his early twenties he's sat week after week, listening to the ravings of just another cookie-cutter race-huckster.

What is Barack Obama for? It's not his "policies," such as they are. Rather, Sen. Obama embodies an idea: He's a symbol of redemption and renewal, and a lot of other airy-fairy abstractions that don't boil down to much except making upscale white liberals feel good about themselves and get even more of a frisson out of white liberal guilt than they usually do. I assume that's what Geraldine Ferraro was getting at when she said Obama wouldn't be where he was today (i.e., leading the race for the Democratic nomination) if he was white. For her infelicity, the first woman on a presidential ticket got bounced from the Clinton campaign and denounced by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann for her "insidious racism" indistinguishable from "the vocabulary of David Duke."

Oh, for cryin' out loud. Enjoyable as it is to watch previously expert tossers of identity-politics hand grenades blow their own fingers off, if Geraldine Ferraro's an "insidious racist", who isn't?

I've been copying quotes from some of the liberal blogs related to their assaults on their intraparty rival.

Apparently, some of this fun was too much for libs on the Daily KOS so they are boycotting.

Excerpt

The blogosphere has never been known for its polite, gentle discourse, and while fiercely partisan, being a Democrat does not make one immune from attacks from the lefty blogs (see Lieberman, Joseph I.). But now, the major internal divisions within the Democratic Party seem to be splitting liberal bloggers. So what happens when the unity enforcement mechanism becomes disjointed?

Apparently, some democratic super delegates are concerned that they're going to have to do their job at the convention.

ExcerptLacking a clear route to the selection of a Democratic presidential nominee, the party’s uncommitted super delegates say they are growing increasingly concerned about the risks of a prolonged fight between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, and perplexed about how to resolve the conflict.

I guess these people thought they would just go to the convention, pass around Eliot Spitzer's black book and have a good ole time. Now they're going to have to show "leadership" qualities and do some work.